When the cake designer Mich Turner gives a dinner party she still makes her
mother's favourite dessert

The dish that takes me straight back to being four years old with my hair in bunches is my mum’s pièce de résistance – a fabulous hazelnut and apricot meringue that she brought out for all high days and holidays. She made two layers of meringue with roasted hazelnuts, sandwiched them together with cream, and served it with apricot and lemon syrup. She pulverised tinned apricots in syrup with the zest and juice of a lemon to make a deeply citrussy, sharp coulis. I think it was a Family Circle recipe, and it’s the sort of thing my older sister and I will make if we’re having a dinner party.

I grew up in the early 1970s and my mum was very good at making sure we had proper home-cooked meals. We didn’t have puddings or sweets regularly, but we were allowed a Friday treat: a Blackberry Farm book, a little pottery animal, or a sweet. Oddly I don’t have an especially sweet tooth, but I used to love pretending I was Delia Smith, and would stand on a chair in front of a bowl of flour and water, rolling out “pastry” to shape into biscuits. As I got older I would cook the family meals, and to this day my sister, my mother and I still share and swap recipes